After introducing Bruce I dove into Twitter and live tweeted his talk. People told me afterward that they thought it was too cheerful – see what you think from these short bursts (I was typing faster than I could think.) Comments encouraged.

Bruce Sterling and I are holding forth in our annual State of the World conversation on the WELL. Here’s the short url for access: http://bit.ly/yNcL9L If you have questions or comments for us, and you’re not a member of the WELL, just send them to inkwell at well.com.

It’s a pretty juicy year for this sort of thing; we’ll have some apocalyptic fun surveying the wreckage. (If you happen to be Lester Brown, and have practicing global prognostication much longer than we have, we especially welcome your comments.)

The whole story is at boingboing.net

This is the quote I wanted to blog: ”The whole time I was thinking about article I would write. Just you fuckers wait.”

Jasmina Tesanovic posts about the arrest of Ratko Mladic here.

As a further financial twist, the state still owes the general his regular pension, which he never received (as a fugitive). Handsome lump-sums have paid by and to the other citizens of the state — mainly, blood money for his victims.

And what about the dead? Do they have a price? Gone without a name, many of them still without graves since their bodies, dismembered and scattered all over the territory are still being sought. The silence of the ghosts is loud as ever in this moment of joy and victory.

Read Jasmina’“Big Day for Italy”: Living in Torino, Jasmina is not far from the beatification ceremonies for Pope John Paul II – a Serbian journalist writing about the Italian response to a Polish pope, now sainted, just a couple of days after the UK pompfest royal wedding. A global culture celebrates traditions that won’t quite go away. Meanwhile for May Day the “politically excluded” took to the Italian streets “with banners of feminists, pacifist, trade unions, unemployed, refugees, minorities etc…clearly stated their distance from empty Unity of Italy celebrations, not to mention the deceased Pope.”

Three different Italies, today in Italian city squares: the Nation, the Church and the Populace, all protesting, stating, showing, claiming and counterclaiming. Like 150 years ago when this young nation was united under one flag and a royal anthem, drenched in blood amid many uncertainties, today too, the classic Italian scenario repeats itself, as a farce of course.

(Update: Alfred Hermida blogs Vivian Schiller’s 7 reasons to be cheerful about journalism at Reportr.net.)

The evolution of networked global communication infrastructures is disrupting and changing delivery of news and the way journalists work. While some publishers have been wringing hands and tearing hair over the collapse of the business model for news publishing, others in the industry get that news, and news authority, will always be relevant, that there will always be a need and a market for informed delivery of and interpretation of facts. I just spent two days (Friday and Saturday, April 1st and 2nd) at the University of Texas’ 12th Annual Global Symposium on Online Journalism, organized by brilliant, forward-looking Professor Rosental Alves. After stewing in the juices of the future of journalism for two days, I’d like to summarize what I think I was hearing.

The future of journalism and the future of Internet are intimately related. The Internet has catalyzed a democratization of knowledge, and is (in my opinion) a force beyond our control, though there are enough discussions about controlling it in some way that I’m seeing discussions of substance about how to resist that control (which are interesting, but out of scope for this post). The democratization of knowledge and the evolution of social tools on the Internet are the two aspects of intense interest on my part that have led me to seemingly diverse projects and discussions involving futurism, politics, evolving markets, participatory medicine, and online journalism. While to some I may seem all over the map, I see a consistency in all of these: they’re all part of an Internet-driven evolution. Politics, marketing, healthcare, and journalism are all experiencing disruption and difficulty as the global online information infrastructure becomes increasingly pervasive and sophisticated.

(Notes:

1. This might be a good place to quote P.D. Ouspensky: “In order to understand a thing, you must see it s connection with some bigger subject, or bigger whole, and the possible consequences of this connection. Understanding is always the understanding of a smaller problem in relation to a bigger problem.”

2. I don’t see “democratization of knowledge” as an inherently wonderful thing. While I’m dedicated to open and distributed knowledge systems, I recognize the relevant issues: “a little knowledge can be dangerous,” “in the wrong hands, knowledge can be dangerous,” etc. I’m also committed to participatory or democratic systems, but with the understanding that they have significant issues – democracy doesn’t scale well, doesn’t necessarily result in the best actions or decisions for all, can be little better than “mob rule,” etc. We have to be thoughtful about these things, and attend to the down sides.)

Internet forces have undermined business models for publishing and news delivery – enough’s been said about that. The UT conference I attended looks beyond that disruption and focuses on the new reality of technology-mediated news dissemination and a new more symmetrical relationship of news organization with news reader. Readers have similar access to the means of production as news organizations, and have the expectation of an environment where they can readily provide feedback on news, if not participate in gathering and disseminationg news stories. Bloggers and small independents are breaking stories and conducting deep investigation. Journalism is becoming a partnership of the news professionals with their more or less informed audiences.

Here are some thoughts and questions I’m having, inspired by the conference (and to some extent by the Future of Journalism track at SXSW Interactive that I helped curate).

• Today’s newsroom is a high technology operation. The new journalist understands code, and there’s a new breed of developer (in the hacks hackers, program or be programmed mode) who understands journalism well enough to be an effective partner in application development. In this context, there’s an evolution from “shovelware” to apps that effectively leverage diverse platforms, especially mobile platforms.
• Will the web and the browser continue to be primary platform for news delivery, or will mobile apps be more prominent and effective? Or (more likely) are we looking at an ecosystem where both will be adopted and used? The web has advantages, including ubiquity, existing infrastructure, linkability, bookmarking and social tech.
• How important are aggregation and curation vs reporting? Are aggregators practicing journalism, or “making sense of the Internet.”
• Many publications are integrating social media, becoming more conversational. How well can conversations scale? Does this have a democratizing effect?
• Revolution in Egypt wasn’t driven by social media alone, but also (if not more so) by Egypt’s independent press.
• How polarized are we, how do we become less polarized, what is the relationship of news to politicization and polarization, and is there a relationship between polarization and credibility?
• What is the impact of moving from a workflow heavily based on editing to real-time publishing models?
• What’s the relationship of news to engagement? How can you both engage and scale?
• New concept: “newsfulness,” or likelihood of a device to be used for news access.
• Is public journalism a public good? Does it make more sense for investigative news organizations to be nonprofit rather than for-profit?
• How do news organizations use, and monetize, Twitter?
• “Gatejumping” vs gatekeeping. Twitter allows early gatekeepers to jump the gates, deliver news directly and immediately.
• Do online journalists have more autonomy than their offline counterparts?
• Open APIs catalyze developer communities, potentially bring new revenue potential, speed up internal and external product development.
• How do news organizations keep up with increasing R&D demands with decreasing budgets?
• What is the impact of pay walls, and how well will they succeed? What makes paywalls viable: scale still matters, but brand is back. Users are depending more on brand authority, advertisers are getting back to basics.

Link to my tweets from the conference.

Bruce Sterling at SXSW 2011

I live-tweeted Bruce Sterling’s talk at SXSW Interactive. Here are the tweets… in reverse chronological order, so read ‘em backwards.

• “Women of Italy, cast away all the cowards from your embraces.” SXSW looks like a new world because it’s got women in it.
• Closing with a Garibaldi quote. “I offer only hunger, thirst, forced marches, battle, and death.” And people went for that.
• This is an era of organized deception! Days of rage, baby. Be realistic, demand the impossible.
• “Move to Austin, take over the town!”
• You need to take power, millenials. I’ll vote for ya! You need a global youth movement.
• Boomers, shut up! What you should study now is collaborative consumption, technomadism.
• Young people are the victims of a decaying status qo.
• They pretend to govern, we pretend to obey.
• Who would save us from the BP? We’re incapable of rapid deciseve action, and the world demands that sometimes.
• What worries me is the response to things that take courage and virtuosity and passion to work out, like disaster response.
• Obese people in the US: “Imagine if the Statue of Liberty looked like that.” It brings out one’s inner Bill Hicks.
• Catholic Church borgia-like devil’s bargain with Berlusconi to get the legislation they want.
• Republicans: “a joke to anyone outside the range of Fox News.”
• People don’t want to throw Berlusconi out, because they fear some kind of economic upheaval.
• Talking about Berlusconi – he’s a head of state behaving like Hugh Hefner. This is a big deal in Italy.
• ExxonMobil are not the only political malefactors, they’re just the best connected.
• ExxonMobil is the personification of corporate evil. (applause)
• You cn do whatever you want to a microbe and no hippie will show up with a protest sign. Microbes are not in the Bible.
• Beautiful social network for synthetic biology: http://bit.ly/ei4Wja (expand)
• Craig Ventner was at SXSW because he’s trying to reframe 20c genetic engineeering as 21stc synthetic biology.
• In our society, we don’t have any passionate virtuosity.Our political situation is the opposite,disgusted incompetence.
• We’ve got a series of problems that are poorly recognized.
• Passionate virtuosity…. the ideas in Worldchanging 2.0 are passionate but lack virtuosity.
• Bruce Sterling shows Worldchanging 2.0 (the book) at sxsw.
• As a design critic, I criticize stuff that doesn’t exist yet.
• Polarizing brand management. Culture wars. Politics from POV of a design critic.
• All the political language has been rendered toxic.
• “There are people here who are younger than the event.”
• At Southby, science fiction authors talk like they know what’s going on.

Coincidentally while I’ve been at the TXGov20Camp that I’ve worked on (via EFF-Austin, along with the LBJ School), what looks like a democratic rebellion’s caught fire in Egypt; there’s people in the streets calling for the resignation of the 30-year president, Hosni Mobarak. The government tried to squash communications by shutting down Internet access, because so much of the action’s been coordinated online. Wikipedia has an overview. Gilad Lotan has created a “jan25″ Twitter list where you can follow tweets from the scene. Aljazeera probably has the best news coverage, and Global Voices is aggregating citizen media from the region. Here’s a piece on the Internet shutdown.

Bruce Sterling and I are well into our annual State of the World conversation over on the WELL. Bruce, who’s traveled the world all his life and has been in unique situations (like his travels through Russia and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain), truly thinks globally, whereas I’m virtually global (via the Internet) though not as well-traveled. I tend to write from a U.S. perspective, which means less these days… sez Bruce,

Back in the 90s, when I was travelling in Europe, I used to get a lot of eager queries about the USA. What’s new over there, what are you doing with your lives and your riches and your technology, why is your government like that? This was considered a matter of urgency, and most Europeans I met, who were naturally from techie, artsy and literary circles, held views of America that were surprisingly like contemporary paranoid Tea Party views. They had interestingly wacky private theologies about the Pentagon, the CIA, Wall Street, the malignant military-industrial complex and so forth… Not that they ever bothered to find out much about the factual operation of these bodies. Stilll, they were sure that the USA really mattered.

Nowadays, the Europeans are just not all that concerned about Yankees. They don’t ask; they’re incurious about America, they are blase’. Being an American in Europe now is rather like being a Canadian, and it’s trending toward being a Brazilian.

…

American soft power is vanishing. Foreigners are much less interested in American television, movies, pop music… America once had a tremendous hammerlock on those expensive channels of distribution, but those old analog megaphones don’t matter half as much in today’s network society.

The USA has become a big banana republic; in other words, it’s come to behave like other countries quite normally behave. The upside is that we don’t get blamed for what happens; the downside is, nothing much happens. Decay and denial. Gothic High Tech.

Video archive of Saturday’s Wikileaks discussion, which was quite compelling… quite a bit about the new world of journalism and Wikileaks’ place in it. These are truly chaotic and “interesting” times.

It’s crazy time in the world at large, a time of social, political, and economic chaos and a questioning of fundamental assumptions we’ve made about how the world works and doesn’t work. You can blame the “interesting” difficulties we’re in on shortsighted politicians, greedy bankers and corporations, god-mad religious fundamentalists, exploding and fragmenting communications… and I’m sure those and others are aspects of the Trouble. But I think we have a deeper problem. We’ve lost our sense of the common ground of humanity, of the pattern that connects us all.

This is too often said and too easy to say: in a profound sense we are united at the core, but we lose the sense of unity, and see only what divides us. How can we feel this truth in our bones? How can we find a way past the significant and growing barrier and borders, the sense of separation that we feel?

Perhaps we can find the common ground through music, a form of communication that can be a common language and source of unity. “From Jerusalem to Cordoba,” a performance Scoop Sweeney and I are producing Friday night (7pm at St. David’s Church, Bethell Hall, 301 E. 8th Street in Austin) is a powerful musical performance by Catherine Braslavsky and Joseph Rowe that includes songs and forms associated with both Christian and Muslim mystical traditions. Behind the music, there is an understanding of the common ground of humanity. In this music, there is a possibility of peace, a sense of our shared source and reality.

I’ve found myself giving cautionary talks on the future of the Internet, or possible futures, plural – the real danger that the Internet and the World Wide Web that operates on it will become less open, perhaps become fragmented, balkanized into closed networks that no longer cooperate, filled with walled gardens with various filters and constraints, and no longer be a platform with low barriers to entry and assurance that if you connect something, anyone anywhere in the world will have access to it. The Internet would no longer be the powerful engine for innovation and communication it has been.

Tim Berners-Lee, who created the World Wide Web, writes about this in Scientific American, saying that some of the web’s “successful inhabitants have begun to chip away at its principles. Large social-networking sites are walling off information posted by their users from the rest of the Web. Wireless Internet providers are being tempted to slow traffic to sites with which they have not made deals. Governments—totalitarian and democratic alike—are monitoring people’s online habits, endangering important human rights.”

If we, the Web’s users, allow these and other trends to proceed unchecked, the Web could be broken into fragmented islands. We could lose the freedom to connect with whichever Web sites we want. The ill effects could extend to smartphones and pads, which are also portals to the extensive information that the Web provides.

Read Berners-Lee’s important longer piece, “Long Live the Web.”

My next scheduled talk about the future of the Internet is January 5 at noon, at Link Coworking.

Hossein Derakhshan, aka Hoder, is evidently facing the death penalty in Iran – for blogging (or, in their words, “collaborating with enemy states, creating propaganda against the
Islamic regime, insulting religious sanctity, and creating propaganda
for anti-revolutionary groups.”) This is nuts, and we should all be blogging in support of Hoder’s release. More information at Global Voices.

The “Katrina People Finder” technology has been updated by Ka-Ping Yee at Google, and placed online. It’s embedded at the State Department’s web site. Not sure why they changed it to “Person Finder,” but it’s simple, easy to use, and has two components: a search, if you’re looking for someone who’s lost, and a way to report information about someone that’s found, confirmed dead, etc.

I’m embedding it here, as well: